Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award recipient Zaffar Abbas praised for his courageous journalistic career

In 1991 Zaffar Abbas was beaten to a pulp when he was a BBC correspondent because the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) was clearly not fond of his reporting. This was the time when the political party was going through a crisis of its own. A faction, Mohajir Qaumi Movement-Haqiqi, was about to leave the party and MQM founder Altaf Hussain was annoyed with the then federal government of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). It was the first government of now incarcerated Nawaz Sharif.

Hussain gave a speech from Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, spoke against the prime minister and accused him of trying to split his party. But he also criticised then president Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who later ended up dismissing Nawaz’s government.

When the MQM realised the mistake of criticising Khan, they sent a letter to all the newspapers that reference to the president should be deleted from the stories. “Everyone obliged,” said Abbas, who is now editor of the Dawn newspaper.

By that time, however, the story had already gone on air quoting Hussain about Khan. The party wanted Abbas to issue an apology in the next bulletin. “I tried to explain that bit of the speech had gone on air in his voice, so it’s not possible to contradict that,” he said and added that the MQM didn’t understand and the next morning 15 people were sent to his apartment in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and they beat him black and blue.

Abbas was speaking at a talk, conducted by writer, intellectual and former federal minister Javed Jabbar at the IBA’s Centre for Excellence in Journalism (CEJ) on Thursday in recognition of his 2019 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award given by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) for extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom.

After the incident, Abbas shared that for the first time the MQM realised what the power of the journalist fraternity was. There were protests across the country, and the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists and local press clubs stepped in. “In Islamabad, the journalist union even stopped MQM MNAs from going inside the parliament,” he recalled.

Pressure groups

Responding to a question from Jabbar if he ever felt the pressure from inside the organisation in identification of communities or sects in news stories that could create further violence, Abbas said that it was a decision based on editors.

Some editors, according to the senior journalist, were of the opinion that there wasn’t any harm in naming the ethnic communities, the communal or sectarian groups. Others, he said, tried to be more careful.

“If there was an Urdu-speaking editor, at times the violence against the Urdu-speaking community was highlighted and violence against other communities was not highlighted the same way,” he said. “Same was true for the editors of Sindhi publications and other publications.”

The ethnic element was always part of journalism in Karachi. “It took us a lot of years trying to understand how to balance it out and how not to be provocative.”

In Karachi, Abbas said, one of the views was in favour of highlighting the massacre of its people. The challenge was how much one could write against the crooks that were defenders of the people of Karachi. For instance, he said, at that time the “MQM was all powerful, controlling Karachi – with guns not through politics.”

He recalled how it was almost impossible to report what the MQM was doing. “But everyone was encouraged to write about other militant groups that were operating in or outside Karachi,” he said and added that the balance was lost over there. Some people back then were of the opinion that if they could not report against the MQM, then they should also refrain from reporting against Jeay Sindh and Punjabi- Pakhtoon Ittehad. “And they had a solid point over there,” he pointed out.

His early life

The mother of Abbas died in 1969 in a road accident when he was in a junior school after which his father raised all the kids. In the early 1970s, he said, his father was secretary of the board of education department in Hyderabad and was forcibly retired in the first Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government.

His family was rendered homeless after that. They were so poor that one of her sisters died of illness as the family didn’t have means for proper medical services.

He remembered his first job was insurance sales agent when he was in 10th grade. “It was the only way to help the family,” he said. One of his brothers went to the army because the family thought that after a few years they could have proper housing.”

Abbas later joined the University of Karachi’s physics department. “The only thing our father did was to make sure that we did not miss our education,” he said. Those were the times when Abbas used to write pamphlets against the Islami Jamiat Talba and then he was advised to pursue journalism.

He then joined The Star newspaper as a junior sports reporter for a salary of Rs850 in 1981. “That is where I met Tasneem [his wife],” he said, smiling. He later joined The Herald magazine in 1988 and in 1990 he joined the BBC and moved to Islamabad in 1992.

He recalled how he was briefly detained in Afghanistan’s city Jalalabad during reporting and was released after Khan Abdul Wali Khan spoke to then Afghanistan’s president Najibullah.

Abbas scored a major scoop as he was the first one to report the outcomes of the talks in Agra between then president Pervez Musharraf and Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In the year 2006 he rejoined Dawn as resident editor Islamabad and later was made its editor.

Future of journalism

When a student of journalism asked him about the future of the industry in Pakistan, Abbas said true journalism could be done through passion only. Speaking on the current media crisis, he said the salary was very important to run home, but what was more important was the real achievement manifested in the “kick” that your story had made a difference or invoked a thought process. Speaking on censorship, he said that “there’s no censorship in the country but it is worse than the censorship”.